Armstrong, A. Riley

Arthur Riley Armstrong was born in Toronto, on December 23, 1904, to Arthur Leopold Armstrong and Bessie Irene Massey. At the age of four, his father passed away and his mother remarried E.S. Glassco. From 1923 to 1930, he studied medicine in the medical school in Toronto, during which period of time he attended the London Medical School Hospital as an undergraduate for a year. After graduation, Dr. Armstrong went to Oxford University for a year before he came back to Toronto and went into Pathological Chemistry. In 1933 he joined the Banting Research, where he worked under Professor E.J. King and together they devised the King-Armstrong method for the measurement of the alkaline phosphatase activity in serum. Following that Dr. Armstrong worked directly with Sir Frederick Banting as his technician, before he went to the Mountain Sanatorium in 1935, where he worked as a part-time biochemist and later the acting director.

During World War Two, Dr. Armstrong joined the army medical corps and being seconded to chemical warfare, where he worked with anti-gas ointments. Later he went to Munsterlager, Germany and worked with the mobile unit until the end of the war in 1945. After the war, Dr. Armstrong resumed as the acting director of the laboratories. He later became the director, serving until his retirement in 1970.